Stealing dream

Night before last I had a dream that I was in a house, my house (but I think it was also the ancestral family home), with S. and my sister. It was a big white wooden house, all one one level. We were in the front room, a spare room, sitting on the edge of the bed by the far wall, looking at something together, I think maybe reading a book or a letter. My mobile phone rang, I went around the other side of the bed to answer it, but then I saw the battery had been replaced by a wrist watch. I realised someone must have just done it to stop it ringing, and then I said, "Shit!", and S. said, "What?" sort of alarmed, and then I tried to sound calm saying, "No, it might be nothing," and I went to the front door and realised that yes, I hadn't locked it when I had come in, and then I said, "Shit!" again. "Someone's in the house, it's my fault, I didn't lock the door when I came in."

I went and shut the door of the spare room, and the rest of us started looking around to see if anything was gone. My sister looked on kind of a sideboard and things looked disturbed, there had been a big pile of things there and there were not many things there now. The drawers had been opened. Something of S's was missing that I can't remember now - maybe a signed photo of a scientist or mathematician? Something flat that had been in a stack of books and other flat things in a drawer.

It occurred to me that the thief would have been right on the other side of the bed from us when he took out the phone battery, and we hadn't noticed at all, we were absorbed in what we were doing.

I went back to the spare room, which still had the door closed, and realised there was someone in it, pushing against the door. I pushed back and cried out to the others, but then opened the door and started screaming at the guy, "Get out! Get out!" It was a youngish man with red hair that fuzzed out on the sides, sort of young and wiry but not too skinny. He started running, scared by me, and went out a side door. I saw him running away across the lawn and across the neighbor's lawn.

Then I went and looked out the window of the spare room and saw another man looking down. He was a bit older, looked kind of dopey, and was dressed in grey. Suddenly I had it worked out - I asked my sister to keep talking to the other man to keep him there. I went out the front door and looked, and there was a bag, like a pillow case, dropped outside the window of the spare room. I went and picked it up and there was all our stolen stuff, including some silver things like a coffee pot and little urn. I felt very clever - I had worked out that the thief had dropped the stuff outside the window, but since I had scared him away he hadn't had a chance to pick it up before running away.

So, something was stolen from me, but I managed to get it back.

I felt absolutely wonderful when I woke up that morning.